Never mind my last post, last night/this morning has been pretty exciting for fishing. Last night I finally caught something (squid...I was going to save one in the freezer for one in the name of science for one of the fish people, but didn't have the heart and threw it back after I had bagged it). Also, last night, Kelly caught a puffer fish, which was apparently incredibly unlikely since we are in deep waters far off shore. And just a bit ago the chief caught a Wahoo...It is huge! It was as tall as me... seriously, someone took a picture of one of the crew members holding it up by the tail with Carly and I standing next to it. Cool! But apparently it will be dinner...

So...my recent lack of posting has gotten at least my mommy concerned, so I figured I'd check in, just in case any one else is also checking in :) Tonight marks the end of cycle four, which means we have just one cycle left and less than two weeks until I am home! The seas have gotten a tiny bit rougher but not too bad, and we are pretty far into our day to day schedule, so there isn't too much new to tell you! Still just tons of filtering, then returning the water back to the ocean with a little less stuff. We are still running two sets of incubation experiments, so one a day. At least tomorrow night I should get to sleep!

So... tonight we actually got a 'night off' from the 2:00 am cast, but of course, I drew the short straw and had to get up at 3:00 am to run the chlorophyll data from last 2:00 am cast. There are two other scientists up right now (everyone else certainly has the good sense to be sleeping) and i can't possibly explain to anyone who doesn't know either why either would still be up. Both super quirky, but great. Anyways, the samples get about an hour to thaw, so here I am. I'm kinda bummed right now because for some reason mu shuffle is evading me, but other than that, all is well. I've been lazy the past day or two, I really want to go for a run, but unfortunately that is not entirely an option at this point, or at least not really a reasonable one. But other than recent laziness I have been biking a bit, stationary of course, and hopefully some day I will be able to keep up with my dad, though it is incredibly unlikely! Certainly my number one goal of the cruise! :)

In all of the turtle excitement yesterday, I forgot to mention that yesterday was actually the 42 birthday of the R/V Melville. Aside from being the oldest running ship in the national oceanographic university system, and being the ship on which King Kong was filmed, I have a few other fun facts that I hope you will enjoy. The Melville has traveled 1,260,000 miles using 30,660,000 gallons of fuel! The Melville has also served over 7500 scientists and over 1,839,50 meals, not to mention approximately 14 fish have been caught. Just kidding about the fish...they lost count of the real number ages ago, we've had a night or two with way more than 14.

TURTLE!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I finally saw a sea turtle, and if you can't tell, I'm super excited about it! I mean, it was pretty lame, you could see the shell and every once in a while it would poke its head up or flap one of its flippers in the air, but still, it was awesome!.

Went in the hot tub tonight around sunset and it was pretty much fantastic! So, the hot tub on the deck? Yeah the chief engineer is awesome and decided instead of pumping the hot sea water surrounding the on-board engines directly back into the ocean, he would re-route it and make a spa. He also lies and shoots potato guns, but that a whole other set of stories! We have moved on to cycle three, which should begin momentarily. Our incubation experiment, which we take samples from every other day look like they should have some really interesting results. I seem to be having trouble formulating cohesive and useful thoughts at the moment, but here: http://www.bigelow.org/index.php?cID=71 ... its the link to Bigelows' blurb on our cruise, far more eloquent at this point in time...

I definitely forgot one...
4. Eat when you can, sleep when you can!

Anyway, we are about to have our usual Wednesday drill where we learn about shipboard safety and practice getting our life-vests and such. Other than that work is as usual...well I guess not...our filter rack went a bit haywire this morning making some of our early morning tasks a bit of a pain. In the past few days we have started cycle 2, which is just a few days...(next comes cycle 3...) and with this new cycle we have started two sets of incubation experiments which look like they should be really cool, though they have certainly added to what had already appeared to be a mildly insurmountable amount of work! These two new experiments focus on enriching water with either silicates or trace metals, and also use varying amount of light to understand population growth...(I know I probably just lost 3/4 of your attention, especially Laura who is I am sure, making infinite amounts of fun of me for being on a 'science' cruise!) And thanks to Judy (or whoever sees mom and dad first) for helping them which their blogging troubles...

Hope everyone had a great Fourth of July! And happy birthday Laura if you actually read this...We had a nice day (unfortunately, there are no long weekends at sea)that ended with a "patriotic 'demonstration'" which included smoke bombs and a series of flares once it got dark (I got to set one off!). Because of all of the holiday spirit, I figured I would enlighten you to some of the revelations I've had/skills I have learned on a boat.
1. The most useful (and subsequently most desirable)thing to bring aboard a research cruise is definitely a bean-bad chair.
2. How to play cribbage
3. How to tie a stellar bowline knot
That's all for know, got to get to work!

Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone! And happy almost birthday, Laura! So we have finally finished our transect and will be beginning cycles at midnight (so, I'm back on the 2:00am shift as opposed being on 4 casts a day around the clock...) We were able to get some rest today, which was nice. Gotta go run some samples, and maybe get a nap in!

I saw dolphins yesterday! They like to ride the bow waves and were jumping all over the place when we were moving. Hopefully I'll get to see some other cool wildlife, there have been a few sea turtle sightings, but every time someone says they see something cool, I miss it or can't see it, story of my life! Anyway, time here is a strange concept...we work in hours, but those don't really seem to translate into days. Since "day" and "night" have effectively become irrelevant, the only thing that matters at this point is when we reach a new station, no matter if it's light or dark. I didn't even know it was Friday until someone happened to mention it a few hours ago. Crazy!

A side note- Internet on a boat:

The internet aboard the R/V Melville is actually quite good, though it is limited. Only webmail can be accessed on personal computers, and there are several computers aboard that have more access and may be used by both the crew and the scientists. It is, however, still limited, such that many sites that require lots of processing (ie, youtube) are not available. It also functions most of the time, but there are certain headings where we are not able to get a signal, which can be frustrating...If you have the time to be frustrated, of course!

Busy, Busy!

So I'm somewhere approximately 3/4 of the way through what will likely be an 18 hour shift. There is a lot going on at each of our sampling locations, so I will try to explain some of the procedures, though I may not get to some of the "what are you actually looking fors" til a bit later on. Basically, we need loads of sea water at each depth, at each location. For the casts that I work on, we deploy a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) sensor, which is fastened to a rosette. On this rosette are 24 10 L bottles that we use for sampling. Each bottle needs to be propped open prior to deployment, and then it takes a team of 3 scientists, a winch driver, a console driver, and a 'restech' (someone who manages the science operations, and we have 2 aboard) to get the rosette in and out of the water. First, the entire system is dropped into the water, taking all relevant profiles using the CTD down to 500 m. Next, on the way up, the rosette stops at various depths so we can manually control the number of bottles we retrieve at various depths, which are designed to give a good overview of the water column, as well as allowing us to focus on depths of interest. Whew, I know all of that is probably hard to digest, so I'll stop here for now!

Starting Out

So as some if not many of you know, I am out to sea for a total of five weeks, off of the coast Pacific Cost of Costa Rica. We are actually more than a week into our voyage, but Kelly and Joaquim have effectively peer-pressured me into making a blog...We have just begun a transect to our second sampling location, and will be en-route for the next few days. During this time we will be stopping every three or four hours to sample in 3 hour time blocks, and I am exhausted just thinking about it. We have had some recent rest since we have been in transit, and have finally picked Joaquim up, so hopefully we are all geared up to go! I'm going to see what we can do about some pictures, but I don't have a cord so I'm going to have to snag one from someone!